Dan Beachy-Quick has written an appreciation of The Four Horsemen at Colorado Review.
Writes Beachy-Quick: “What recommends this book so highly in my mind is the alternative path it points out for what poetry scholarship might look like—not an arcane exploration of academic expertise, but an enthused initiation into the arcane mysteries poetry still embeds within itself.”
I have a new book! It’s available for purchase through the Cultural Society website.
Here’s what Steven Toussaint says about the book:
Those in the know know that Peter O’Leary is the torchbearer of a rich if neglected poetic lineage: the “American Gnostic.” Through his critical and editorial labors, O’Leary has initiated poets and readers into the secret wisdom and apocalyptic promise transmitted unbrokenly from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, down through Robert Duncan and Ronald Johnson, to contemporaries like Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donahue, and Pam Rehm. Those who read O’Leary’s poetry feel the wind and precipitation of a unique imaginarium peopled by dreamers, ascetics, birders, analysts, foragers, sorcerers—all of them watchers, watchful for God in his multiform emanations.
In The Four Horsemen, O’Leary turns his eye to Dante, Milton, Blake, and Whitman. His critical style is enthusiastic, quite literally “god-possessed.” His passwords are vision, power, and transmission. His reading is fired by conviction: that the revelatory imperatives of apocalyptic poetry flout our current cultural inertia and spiritual despair. The result is a book of true importance, which is less concerned with rewriting literary history than with seeing what happens when the shocking and destabilizing language of poets works on the souls of other poets, on O’Leary himself, over time, and then with following those lines of force wherever they lead. As rigorous as it is rapturous, The Four Horsemen is the best guide I know for how to live intensely with poetry.
In the early summer of 2023, as part of a virtual gathering to consider Phosphorescence of Thought, Earth Is Best, and The Hidden Eyes of Things, I gave a reading on Zoom.
If you’re curious, you can access the reading here. At the prompt, the password is: x%pskg7j
A while back, an essay that I wrote about reverence, with the same title, was published as part of the “Noli Me Tangere” project at Indiana University.
I will be giving a reading with John Tipton and Leila Wilson on Tuesday, December 6, 2022 for the Cactus Flower Reading Series at 3454 N. Bell Ave., in Roscoe Village. I’ll be reading from The Hidden Eyes of Things for the first time in Chicago since the book was published this past summer. John will be reading from his amazing new book Believers. And Leila will be reading from new work. Exciting!
Speaking of Hidden Eyes, I read the Neptune section of the poem at the Poetry and Spirituality symposium at Xavier University last month, hosted by the great Norman Finkelstein.
Here is a link to the video from the reading.
Last month, I joined Al Filreis, Laynie Brown, and Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué to discuss H.D.’s legendary poem “Heat,” along with Robert Duncan’s magisterial reading of the poem from the opening of The H.D. Book. This is part of the free ModPo (“Modern & Contemporary American Poetry”) course that runs out of Kelly Writers House and Penn.
Speaking some more of Hidden Eyes, here is a link to a flatteringly perceptive review of the book by the (once again) great Norman Finkelstein. You may have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to get to the review.
And here is a similarly perceptive and impressively argued interpretation of The Sampo by Sean Reynolds. This essay, “Translation for the End Times: Peter O’Leary’s The Sampo,” appears in an anthology called Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms, edited by David Hadbawnik.
Translation for the End Times: Peter O’Leary’s The Sampo
Finally, “I’m Sorry for Everything.”
Very pleased to announce the publication of The Hidden Eyes of Things, a new book-length poem out from the Cultural Society. You can order the book directly from the Cultural Society here; or you can order it from SPD.
The Hidden Eyes of Things completes the trilogy on poetry and consciousness begun in Phosphorescence of Thought (about the evolution of consciousness), and continued in Earth Is Best (about altered states of consciousness). The Hidden Eyes of Things explores the unconscious through the discipline of astrology.
I decided not to include in the book itself the list of all the books I consulted and used but include it here for anyone who might be interested.
THE HIDDEN EYES OF THINGS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
These are the books I consulted, borrowed and quoted from, and ruminated on over the long course of the composition of this poem.
Abu’l-Rayhan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, The Book of Instruction in the Elements of the Art of Astrology, Astrology Classics 2006.
Robert Hinckley Allen, Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning. Dover 1963.
Tamsyn Barton, Ancient Astrology, Routledge 1994.
Austin Coppack and Daniel A. Schulke, The Celestial Art: Essays on Astrological Magic, Three Hands Press 2018.
Brian Cox, Wonders of the Solar System, Collins 2011.
Franz Cumont, Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans, Dover 1960.
Dionysius (Pseudo-Dionysius), The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, Classics of Western Spirituality 1987.
Marsilio Ficino, The Book of Life, trans. Charles Boer, Spring Publications 1980.
The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, volumes I-III, trans. members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, London, Gingko Press 1985.
Fred Gettings, The Arkana Dictionary of Astrology, Arkana 1985.
Fred Gettings, The Book of the Zodiac, Triune 1972.
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Penguin Classics 1960.
Robert Hand, Horoscope Symbols, Whitford Press, 1981.
James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War, Penguin 2004.
Homeric Hymns Homeric Apocrypha Lives of Homer, ed. and trans. Martin L. West, Loeb 2003.
Brian Innes, Horoscopes: How to Draw and Interpret Them, Arco 1978.
Carl Kerényi, Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence, trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series LXV.I 1963.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W.H.D.Rouse, Loeb 1992.
Manilius, Astronomica, trans. G.P. Goold, Loeb 1997.
Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephan MacKenna, Pantheon 1969.
David A. Rothery, The Planets: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford 2010.
Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, Viking 2006.
Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, Faber and Faber 1958.
Akseli Gallen-Kallela, The Defense of the Sampo, 1896
The Sampo is alive, churning out coins, salt, magic, language. Geoffrey O’Brien mentions the poem in an article he has written about a new translation of The Kalavela published in the New York Review of Books. Writes O’Brien, “Writers of fantasy and science fiction continue to draw on [the Kalevala]. The American poet Peter O’Leary has recently taken its central narrative thread as the springboard for The Sampo (2016), a vigorously incantatory poem to which I am grateful for leading me back to the Kalevala legends.”
Earth, thankfully, continues to be Best. Kylan Rice has written an extensive review of Earth Is Best for West Branch, which includes a similarly extensive review of Toby Martinez de las Rivas’s Black Sun, a book I return to constantly for its incandescent language and bracing severity. About Earth Is Best, writes Rice: “‘What if the god is a mushroom after all?’ O’Leary wonders, reversing the allegorical paradigm that would see in sporing image of the resurrection, rather than vice versa. Intent on its this-wordliness, O’Leary mythologizes fungus in the hope of returning us to the earth not as a purified paradiso terrestre, but as an uneven terrain of laborious and localized healing in the aftermath of catastrophe.”
Finally, Knapsack has become Gabby Start. Here is his first video.
In this time of pandemic, I’ve done some readings, all on Zoom or YouTube. This seems to be the poetic way of the present, not such a bad thing, in fact. I’ve enjoyed “attending” readings from poets all around the country and world in the past four months, a welcome interference with the menace and challenge of the Plague.
Here I am reading “Totality,” the solar section of The Hidden Eyes of Things, a forthcoming epic poem about the unconscious activated through the discipline of astrology. Here I’m reading with Patrick Morrissey, whose book Light Box, John Tipton and I will be publishing with Verge Books in October 2021. My contribution begins at the thirteen-minute mark.
Here I am offering a reflection on the role of Mary in the Church, something posted on the website of my parish, Ascension Church. It’s also a reflection on Henry Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres.
And here I am as part of a large group reading for the new Ecopoetics anthology, Poetics for the More-than-Human World, that appeared on the Dispatches website. My contribution to this reading begins at the ten-minute mark. I also participate in the discussion after the readings proper conclude.
The Ecopoetics anthology includes a review of Earth Is Best, written by the indefatigable Mark Scroggins. Its first sentence gives me thrills and chills.
On September 10, 2020, I will be reading on Zoom for Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, one of the few truly essential cultural institutions to poetry. I will be reading with Roberto Harrison, in conjunction with his virtual gallery show at Woodland Pattern, “Tropical Lung: Tec Alliance,” which is Immense. Magnificent. Terrifying.
Mabila Horizons / earth as interior solitudes, by Roberto Harrison.
Roberto is a Great Companion; I’m thrilled to be reading with him.
Finally, another section from The Hidden Eyes of Things, “The Strokes of the Moon,” was recently published on Blazing Stadium, the already dynamic and thrilling electronic journal edited by Tamas Panitz, Whit Griffin, and Lila Dunlap.
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re well, taking care of yourself, and taking care of others.
Portrait of the author, painted by Michael O’Leary, Cambridge, Massachusetts, circa 1993.
Some readings are coming in support of Earth Is Best and beyond.
February 20, 2020, at 1:30 p.m., I will be speaking on the poetry of John Peck in relation to the Red Book of C.G. Jung, joined in a broader discussion on Peck’s work by Elizabeth T. Grey, Jr. and Joseph Donahue.
February 21, 2020, at 10 p.m., I will be join Jeanne Heuving in a poetry reading for selva oscura press at the Brown Hotel in downtown Louisville.
February 22, 2020, at 2:45 p.m., I will chair a reading by Nathaniel Tarn from his magnificent Atlantis: An autoanthropology, whose respondents will be Norman Finkelstein, Forrest Gander, and Nathaniel Mackey.
March 24, 2020, I will be reading in the evening with Alan Felsenthal at Measure Twice in Brooklyn New York.
April 30, 2020, I will be reading in the evening at Trinity College, Cambridge University.
May 1, 2020, I will deliver a lecture, “Three Apocalypses,” at Trinity College, Cambridge University. The respondent will be Rowan Williams.
Look for readings in Milwaukee and Colorado in the Fall!
I have uploaded to the Ronald Johnson page of this website RJ’s ARK 38, which consists of his recordings of birdsongs, meant to be a response to the collaged material in ARK 37, which consists of snips from Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Western Birds of North America.
Truly, the best.
My new book, Earth Is Best, will shortly be published by the Cultural Society. It’s a book of odes about mushrooms, mushroom foraging, altered states of consciousness, modern crises, and antique realities. It is a sequel to Phosphorescence of Thought. (In turn, it will one day be followed by its own sequel, The Hidden Eyes of Things, a planetary epic that approaches the unconscious through the discipline of astrology.) Earth Is Best takes its title from the opening three words of Pindar’s magnificent first Olympian Ode, elementally adjusted. The book, which features a gorgeous illustration of amanita muscaria by Todd Buck (below), was designed by Crisis.
Illustration by Todd Buck.
I will be launching Earth Is Best at a reading/performance at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore on Tuesday, November 12, 2019 at 6 p.m. I will be joined in the performance by Mark Booth, who will accompany the reading with improvised and found music.
The book will be available at the reading and, before too long, at the Cultural Society’s website. For the curious, here is a more detailed description of the book.
In a time of ecological crisis, Peter O’Leary finds in mushrooms “an elaborate pattern,” a circulation of energy, a strange Kingdom with the power to alter consciousness. From the opening line “Earth is best,” each proposition takes root in the terroir of soils, in the woods and meadows of the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest. On each foray, we find hidden systems bearing fruit, “crowning from the duff of white pines / and birch trees,” extending upward from “loam’s rich undying gloom.” Equally, these poems bloom from a rich mulch of linguistic inheritance, a compost of ancient texts and esoteric knowledge, searching out old words of exquisite exactitude and resonance. As readers, our attention quickens as we join the hunt, discovering elemental pleasures on every page, sometimes with the prickling onset of psychedelic consciousness. And like fungi, these poems work to break down false oppositions, returning us to a reciprocity between death and life, panic and joy, anxiety and euphoria, tocsin and cure.
Ad Astra Per Aspera: Selinger, Scroggins, O’Leary, and Bettridge, Louisville, 2011 (?)—a while ago for sure.
The estimable Joel Bettridge has published a penetrating book in the Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature series entitled Avant-Garde Pieties: Aesthetics, Race, and the Renewal of Innovative Poetics. The fourth chapter, entitled “Case Studies,” includes a reading of Phosphorescence of Thought in relation to Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Kenneth Goldsmith’s The Weather. Strange bedfellows! But Bettridge’s reading is unusually astute. He really gets the poem. Here’s a PDF of his reading of my poem.
Bettridge on Phosphorescence of Thought.
And if you’re interested, Avant-Garde Pieties.
Nathaniel Tarn, Norman Finkelstein, and Michael Heller, February 2018, in Louisville, Kentucky (at Alan Golding's house).
On October 5, 2018, at 6 p.m. at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, Norman Finkelstein (pictured above between the colossi of Nathaniel Tarn and Michael Heller) will be giving a reading. I will be serving as his interlocutor.
Norman is coming to read from his outstanding new book, From the Files of the Immanent Foundation. What is the Immanent Foundation, you ask? That question may be too sensitive for me to ask the poet directly; however, I can promise to ask other questions the circumlocutions of whose answers will very likely provide us with a shape if not an exact history of this institution.
In (even) more self-serving news, I was interviewed for the University of Chicago alumni magazine by Carrie Golus, which includes me saying perhaps unusual things, and has this photograph of me taken in Rockefeller Chapel back on a rainy spring day.
Two new reviews of Thick and Dazzling Darkness. One comes from Nick Ripatrazone, published at The Millions. Writes Ripatrazone, "In Thick and Dazzling Darkness, O’Leary offers readers a reminder of the complexity of earnest religious poetry. He also offers critics a guidebook on how to examine religious verse: with the respect they should afford earnest subjects. If a poet chooses to believe, let’s hear her song."
Another comes from Kylan Rice, appearing in Literature and Belief. Here is a PDF of the review. Writes Rice: "Despite its unusual engagement with [the] terms of [its] debate, O'Leary's book is a methodologically diverse, playful, and attentive reading of ten contemporary poets. O'Leary's prose, which reflects the 'occult convolutions' he sees rippling through the history of American poetry, is alone worth the sale price."
That sale price got you down? If you order the book from the Columbia University Press website, and you plug in the coupon code CUP30, you can buy the book at a 30% discount. You should really do it.
In other news, I will be at Calvin College in Grand Rapids from June 12-15, at a symposium on Christian poetics.
What's going on with the title of this post?
through forests of gristle,
My skull and Lord Hereford's Knob equal,
All Albion one.
One of the all-time greatest poems. I lived in Saint Louis for eighteen months beginning in August 2000. Eero Saarinen's magnificent Thomas Jefferson Gateway Arch is a glorious minimal aleph in maximal size. The photo above was taken on August 21, 2017, the day of the total solar eclipse.
Icon of Moses on Sinai at the Burning Bush, 13th century, St. Catherine's Monastery. Take off thy sandals from off thy feet.
Last month, Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age received a generous notice by Steven Toussaint, native of Chicago, citizen of New Zealand, and presently residing in Cambridge. Steven mentioned the book as part of the "Reading List" feature connected to Poetry magazine. Here is what he said:
"Do we have a functional grammar for theological reflection in poetry today? This question has served as a guiding principle in the choice of much of my reading lately. Peter O’Leary’s recent collection of critical essays, Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age, is doubly ambitious. He not only conducts original, searching readings of nine contemporary poets—among them Geoffrey Hill, Fanny Howe, Robert Duncan, and Nathaniel Mackey—but also convincingly argues a “way forward for poetry” that would honor twentieth-century experimentation and pioneering, while at the same time refashioning a language within which intimations of anagogy and apocalypse might seriously contend. O’Leary’s definition of “religion” is capacious enough to include all manner of syncretism and heterodoxy and yet restrained enough to serve as a transformative (even troublesome) force in the poetry he examines. His critical style is refreshingly personal, even anecdotal."
On March 1, I delivered a talk on Thick and Dazzling Darkness for the Lumen Christi Institute at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The talk was video recorded. You can watch all 82 minutes of the thing on YouTube. (The talk is forty-five minutes long; a half-hour of questions ensued.)
Thick and Dazzling Darkness/Lumen Christi
I also conducted an interview with Mark Franzen for the Lumen Christi podcast. Stay tuned for that!
Icon of the Second Coming. Greece. From around 1700.
Two upcoming appearances. Well, actually three. The first is two-for-one.
On Friday, February 23 and Saturday, February 24, 2018, I will be participating in two panels at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900.
On Friday, February 23, I'll be a respondent on a panel including the work of the great poet Márton Koppány. Here's one of Márton's poems.
And here's a photo of Márton at Lake Balaton in Hungary.
Photo by Gyöngyi Boldog
Then, on Saturday, February 24, I will be participating on a panel in honor of Nathaniel Tarn's ninetieth birthday, which is coming later this year. I'll be speaking about Messianic Time in Tarn's late poetry, which is magnificent. (The late poetry, that is. Messianic time, which I've only ever intuited, will also very likely be magnificent.)
Here is a photo of Tarn and myself, taken in Santa Fe in July 2016. Look at that beautiful Cultural Society t-shirt.
Back in Chicago, on Thursday, March 1, 2018, at 4:30 p.m. in Swift Hall at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, I will be speaking about Thick and Dazzling Darkness for the Lumen Christi Institute. Here are the details for the event. There's a full Moon opposed to the Sun conjunct Neptune, so it's bound to be mystically potent. I'll be speaking among other things on the work of Frank Samperi, Fanny Howe, Joseph Donahue, and Pam Rehm.
So, what are you waiting for? HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME.
Ladies and Gentlemen: the poet Ronald Johnson.
Thanks to a kind invitation by host Robin McLachlen, a recording of Ronald Johnson reading "ARK 34," his homage to Louis Zukofsky dedicated upon hearing of the death of the poet in 1978, and which begins the parts of ARK that make up the poem's second section, entitled "The Spires," aired on January 11, 2018 on CKCU FM 93.1 in Ottawa, Canada, along with a reading from me of my poem "Dante," which appears in Luminous Epinoia, published in 2010 by the Cultural Society, that resets/para-translates/dilates on Paradiso XXIV & XXV. Lots of other good stuff on the show. Have a listen!
Literary Landscape with Robin McLachlan.
The recording of "Dante" was executed by Gabby O'Leary, who goes by Knapsack. Have a listen to him, too!
On the Front Table...
Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age has been officially published by Columbia University Press. I am thrilled. And moreso because the book is presently displayed on the legendary Front Table at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, one of the great storehouses of intellectual power on the planet. Making the Front Table... Is there anything to compare to it? Meeting the Pope? Throwing a no-hitter? That's how I'm feeling.
Here's a longer view of that magnificent plank of books...
Front Table anyone?
About a month ago, I contributed to the Seminary Co-op's terrific podcast, Open Stacks, where I had a conversation with its host Colin McDonald about the necessity of religious poetry. Thanks to Colin for the invitation. Take a listen if you're curious.
Colin also asked me to make a text contribution. So I wrote an essay called "So you want to be a religious poet?" This could perhaps be used like a road map.
In other news, I will be involved with a panel on the poetry of the great Nathaniel Tarn at the annual Louisville Conference on Saturday, February 24, 2018. Hidden mystagogue Joseph Donahue will be presiding. Tarn himself will be present and reading poetry the evening before, on Friday, February 23, at a reading hosted by the illuminating web journal Lute & Drum.
Here is a recent photograph of Tarn and Donahue captured in occult conference deep beneath the surface of the earth...
Donahue and Tarn contemplating the void of holy logos.
And because the world does not consist entirely of books, here is a photo taken in some antique land, perplexed by blue sky where boys and men stride into the tatters of the clouds. Is it the Planet of the Apes?
Upward into glory.
A new book of critical prose, Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age, will be published this November by Columbia University Press. I am stoked. This represents over fifteen years of work; its appearance (I'm tempted to say "epiphany") fulfills long labor.
Here is the description of the book:
In Thick and Dazzling Darkness, Peter O’Leary offers a new reading of modern and contemporary poets’ treatment of religion and the nature of the divine in a secular age. The book seeks to come to terms with an often obscured spiritual impulse that drives the production and imagination of American poetry.
O’Leary presents close and comprehensive readings of the modernist, late-modernist, and postmodern poets Robinson Jeffers, Frank Samperi, and Robert Duncan, as well as the contemporary poets Joseph Donahue, Geoffrey Hill, Fanny Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Pam Rehm, and Lissa Wolsak. He argues that an anxiety of misunderstanding exists in the study and writing of poetry between secular and religious impulses and that the religious nature of poets’ works is too often marginalized. Examining the works of a specific poet in each chapter, O’Leary reveals their complexity and offers a defense of the value and meaning of religious poetry against the grain of a secular society.
And here is an endorsement by G.C. Waldrep:
Thick and Dazzling Darkness undertakes the daunting task of exploring spirituality (qua poetry) in a way that connects such otherwise dissimilar poets as the self-consciously backward-looking Robinson Jeffers, the peculiarly American modernism of Robert Duncan, and the (at)tendent postmodernism of Fanny Howe and Nathaniel Mackey. O'Leary creates a conceptual fabric through which we can "read" this diverse group of poets—some well-served in scholarly circles, others rapidly falling off the American poetry radar. Given our cultural predicament as Americans, this work could not be more timely.
And here is the table of contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age
1. A Mystical Theology of Angelic Despair: Writing Religious Poetry and the Trilogy of Frank Samperi
2. Robinson Jeffers, the Man from Whom God Hid Everything
3. Spiritual Osmosis: Absorbing the Influence in Geoffrey Hill’s Later Poetry
4. Prophetic Frustrations: Robert Duncan’s Tribunals
5. What Lies Beneath My Copy of Eternity? Religious Language in the Poetry of Lissa Wolsak
6. Catholics: Reading Fanny Howe
7. Robert Duncan’s Celestial Hierarchy
8. The Long Huthered Hajj: Nathaniel Mackey’s Esotericism
9. Apocalypticism: A Way Forward for Poetry
Conclusion: Why Not Be Totally Changed Into Fire?
Permissions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
It is my understanding that this book will also be available through the Knowledge Unlatched platform. Stay tuned for details. And in the meantime, convince your libraries - local and university - to buy a copy!
Back in February, I had a poem published in the "Nature and Myth" pamphlet in Corbel Stone Press's marvelous Contemporary Poetry Series, a little ditty about myrrh. And then in June, I had another poem, this time a portion of an Amanita Ode called "Toadstool," published in the "Nature and Regeneration" number. Corbel Stone, edited by Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton, publishes Reliquiae, along with Hambone, my present favorite poetry journal. Reliquiae is truly wonderful - dedicated by credo to "landscape, ecology, folklore, esoteric philosophy and animism" - and the pamphlets in the Contemporary Poetry Series are replete with sublime work.